Chicago White Sox on the Brink of Baseball Immortality

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“You have to have a sense of humor,” said Chicago White Sox pitcher Davis Martin, and yeah, that would certainly help. The White Sox lost their 120th game of the expiring baseball season on Sunday, making them only the second team in the last 125 years to lose that many, and only the third team to do so since organized baseball began in 1876.

Martin himself hasn’t won a game all year. He offered some insight into what it was like to be a professional athlete on a team that lost its game virtually every day: “You walk that fine line of being on the edge of losing your mind — always on that razor’s edge. We’re just watching it all, and we’re like, oh my gosh, this happens and this happens. Truly, it’s so many things.”

So many things — 120, in fact, and counting. As of this writing, the ChiSox have six more games left. If they lose even one of them, they’ll set a modern record for losses. If they lose two or more, they will go down (way down) in history as the worst major league baseball team ever.

Some wags will at this point bring up the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, a National League team that famously won only twenty games and lost 134 and was then unceremoniously dropped from the league. But the past is another country. Major League Baseball tends to discount records from before 1901 when the American League was founded and the modern era of baseball is considered to have begun.

In this case, there is a good reason for doing so. The owners of the Cleveland Spiders, a pair of brothers named Frank and Stanley Robison, were allowed to own another major league team as well, the St. Louis Browns, which they called the Perfectos, and is now the Cardinals. The Robison brothers wanted their Perfectos to be perfect, so they transferred all the halfway decent players on the Spiders to St. Louis, leaving the Cleveland team stocked with retreads, has-beens, and never-weres. Today, in our morally upright and scrupulous era, that would never be allowed, and so the Spiders’ 1899 record is not one that will give any consolation to the present-day White Sox.

Instead, the White Sox are vying for baseball immortality with the 1962 New York Mets, who won 40 games and lost 120. Even though both the White Sox and the Mets have lost 120 games, with a break or two, the Sox could still escape the title of “Worst Baseball Team of All Time,” since the Mets had two rainouts and thus ended up playing only 160 games. The White Sox will play 162, which means they could still win one or two more games than the Mets did.

Back in 2003, the Detroit Tigers had won 38 games and lost 118 and had six left to play. Manager Alan Trammell challenged them to summon up enough pride and gumption to avoid the moniker of “World’s Worst Baseball Team,” and the Tigers rose to the occasion, winning five of their last six and finishing with only 119 losses, one less than the Mets. It could happen. The White Sox could win five of their last six. A meteor could also strike the earth and end human life as we know it before the baseball season ends, but the chances of either one happening are not high.

ESPN gave some insight Tuesday into how the season has gone on the South Side:

In only the past month, they offered third baseman Miguel Vargas running into outfielder Andrew Benintendi, and infielder Lenyn Sosa not knowing a between-innings throw from a catcher was coming to second base and wearing the ball off his face, and Andrew Vaughn hitting what looked like a walk-off home run only for Texas outfielder Travis Jankowski to reach over the fence and yank it back for what may be the catch of the year. In Martin’s start, a 6-4 loss, the Cleveland Guardians twice scored a pair of runs on infield singles, a laughable way for Chicago to drop its 15th straight game at home.

That’s how baseball immortality is achieved, or at least it’s one way to achieve it. As the United States and the whole giddy globe hurtles toward whatever conflagration awaits us, the smoking ruin of the 2024 Chicago White Sox takes us back to a more innocent time when our own troubles were not so overwhelming that we had the luxury of sharing in the sorrows of a beloved baseball team. Maybe, just maybe, those days will continue for a while. And even if they don’t — well, you have to have a sense of humor.